> The line from the zen of Python about how "there should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" is something that people all too often forget.

The zen of Python should be the zen of all languages.

Unfortunately in practice you see snowflake implementations left and right in python.

It’s still unclear to me if python is too expressive for its own good, or if it’s so widely used, that it’s impossible to avoid nonsense

Yes, it should be. Sadly it's not even unambiguously the zen of Python these days.

Yes, one way to do it. Sync or async!